The long-sought-after keepsake finally made its way to the Dischord Records website as part of the Fugazi Live Series, a slow-but-sure attempt to release all 800-plus Fugazi shows captured on tape between 1987 and ’03. I already have the April 16, 1993, show at the old Bomb Factory. And it’s great; I still listen to it every so often. But it’s not nearly as legendary as The Night the Dallas Police Department Tried to Stop Fugazi But Couldn’t — thanks, in large part, to Kelly Handran, who put on the show at the request of Fugazi frontman Ian MacKaye.

Now, Kelly didn’t know MacKaye at the time. “Ian just called me out of the blue,” she recalls from her Austin home. “And he said, ‘I hear you can put on a show.’ And I said, ‘Oh, yeah, sure’ — like I’d ever done anything like that before. And, of course, it was the fiasco that it was.”

Kelly’s referring to the fact that she figured, oh, maybe 200 would show for the show that featured Last Rites as the opening act. Instead, she recalls, “people kept coming in and coming in,” among them a few of the skinheads who frequented Deep Ellum back in the early ’90s. “Everyone was pushing on the stage,” Kelly recalls, “and it collapsed.” At which point …

“We’d hired police to be on site, so they must have called in and said, ‘Dude, this thing is out of control,’” Kelly recalls with a slight laugh at this late date. “And when they came in, they brought the fire department, the ATF, you name it. My most vivid memory is watching Ian negotiate with — and my being intimidated by — that police force. And Ian just struck it head on: This is what the situation is, how can we mitigate it without turning it into a riot, what can we do. The main issue was there were too many people without a fire exit — we got a citation for that.”

In the end, the band was allowed to play inside the warehouse — but only if the audience went outside. We’ll let Fugazi pick up the tale from there:

The band and promoters worked to make the corrections while the crowd waited for nearly an hour. Finally after their demands were met, we were told that there would be no show and that we should inform the audience. We refused. After further negotiations, the authorities decided that the band could play, but that the audience would have to leave the building. This struck us as insane, but that’s what the police wanted to do. They closed down the street out front and the garage door was opened to let the sound spill out. We periodically put down the gear and went down to look out at the crowd to make sure that they weren’t being beaten, but as far as we were able to tell they were having a blast. Dancing in the street and stage-diving off of parked cars and dancing in the street. Check the last track in the download for a recording of what it sounded like outside in the crowd!

The recording’s fantastic, of course, courtesy Joey Picuri, who recorded the band for posterity throughout its remarkable run. But this particular flashback isn’t just full of great performances (beginning with “Waiting Room” off ’89′s immortal 13 Songs). It also serves as a thrilling aural documentary of Dallas way back when a little thing like a punk-rock concert could blow up into a turning point, and a would-be riot turns into a levelheaded plea (“Let’s peacefully go outside,” says MacKaye, “easy going”) and a street-level shout-a-long (all of it featuring, like I need to tell you, language you won’t find in a family newspaper). Given all the interludes, during which the band runs from stage to window to check on the crowd between songs, it’s the best episode of This American Life ever.

“To this day it’s one of his favorite shows,” says Kelly, who remains close with MacKaye. “And I remember every microdetail, because it was such a defining moment in my life. Oh. My. God. I found out that night the power of how charismatic a person can be to change events. Things could have gone so horribly, horribly, horribly wrong, and Ian just stepped in and grabbed it by the reins and turned that thing around — and it turned out to be a memorable event.”

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